Abhishek Kaicker is a historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with expertise in the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia.
His first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (OUP 2020) shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects: one, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal empire; and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is also writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, oenophile and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi.
Together with Professors Asad Ahmed (Berkeley) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell), Professor Kaicker is an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of premodern South Asia.
Abhishek Kaicker earned his PhD from Columbia University and completed his MA at University of British Columbia.
Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation
Maeve Cooke, Professor of Philosophy, University College, Dublin; Response by Martin Jay, Professor Emeritus of History, Emeritus Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
An event in a series of interventions organized by the Critical South book series, a project of International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs.
Friday, October 30, 2020
Not One Less: Mourning, Disobedience and Desire, a conversation with the author María Pia López (Sociologist, Argentina), and feminist scholars Paola Bacchetta (UC Berkeley), and Leticia Sabsay (LSE), moderated by Natalia Brizuela (UC Berkeley).
On June 3, 2015, massive women’s street demonstrations took place in many cities across Argentina to protest against femicide. Under the slogan Ni una menos, Not One (Woman) Less, thousands of women took to the streets to express their outrage at systematic violence against women, giving a face and a voice to women who might otherwise have died in silence. Maria Pia López, a founding member and active participant in the Not One Less protest, offers in this book a first-hand account of the distinctive aesthetics, characteristics and lineages of this popular feminist movement, while examining the broader issues of gender politics and violence, inequality and social justice, mourning, performance and protest that are relevant to all contemporary societies.
Presented by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) directors Jonathan Sheehan and Mark Csikszentmihalyi explain why religion should be studied at public institutions like Berkeley. Recorded with local CBS affiliate KPIX' Mosaic in summer, 2017.
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